


Stair Wars

by FanofBttf



Category: Phineas and Ferb, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Basically the same stuff from Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars, F/M, Heavily inspired by Matthew Stover's Novelization, Indecisive Parody, Present Tense, Sibling Incest, The Dark Side of the Force, Though so is the movie, Tragedy, Which is really great, major character deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-07-10 01:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19897366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanofBttf/pseuds/FanofBttf
Summary: There is a dimension in which a Galactic Republic fell into darkness, in part due to the actions of a fallen Jedi Knight, Anakin Skywalker, whose strong passions, insecurities and violent tendencies eventually consumed him and the wife he tried to save.There is a dimension in which a teenaged girl wastes away her summer trying to bust her creative and competent inventor of a younger brother despite the fact that ultimately, they care deeply about each other. In some interpretations, he cares for her in more than one way... a way that she might return.There is a dimension in which the two are crossed over so that the Flynn siblings grow up in the same galaxy as Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa. But none of that is canon, so just relax.But what happens when you are a fan of both PnF and Star Wars, and you and your friend start joking around one day not just about PnF characters in the Star Wars world, but about PnF characters as Star Wars characters?The result of this is a fourth dimension. One in which the Jedi and Sith are restricted to the Tri-State Area. One where Candace Flynn is a Jedi Knight and Phineas Flynn has a seat on the City Council.The world is small, but the drama is big.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this is a teaser - one that might not make sense out of context, because there is the occasional inside joke in here. But I hope it'll leave you curious nonetheless. 
> 
> Full credit to Toxic_Waste for helping me come up with the concept of Stair Wars (and the name) and helping me flesh it out. A lot of the choices for which PnF character should be which Star Wars one are his, so you'll have someone else to blame if you don't like it.

A couple of years back, in a town in Central Minnesota...

**_STAIR WARS_ **  
**_Episode III_ **  
**_Revenge of the Sith_ **

This is a tale.

A tale of heroes, and of villains. Of a love story – a family – that consumed an average Midwestern town of about 250.000 residents.

It is a tale that will not be forgotten. Which will stick in the mind of those who listened to it even after Disney has long aired other cartoons for them to watch.

It happened long ago – maybe even ten years, which is an entirely different era already, just ask cell phone developers – and yet, the story remains rich and alive to us looking in on it. Because it is a tale about normal people, people like ourselves, struggling not just with the difficulties of life, but also with powers that we may not have but that represent dilemmas that are no less present for us. It is about people who have dreams and desires, fears and insecurities, that are real to every one of us.

Power. Love. Survival. Pigeons. Shoes.

It is these desires that bring about the end of the Jedi and the term-limited Legislature. It is these desires that are present as our story begins, in a Tri-State Area that _yet_ bathes in light. A people who can _yet_ feel free and happy, despite the chaos and destruction that the Clone Wars have brought.

Because they have no idea that those all-too-human emotions of our main protagonists are about to sink their world into darkness, an all-consuming darkness that will last for… just over twenty years, after which it will be removed forever, provided that the next generation doesn’t mess things up again. But never mind that right now.

Because this is the end of an era.

And it starts now.


	2. Candace

Gunfire is blazing through the skies over downtown Danville.

That is the first tell that anything is wrong as two airplanes approach City Hall. Gunfire isn’t _supposed_ to be blazing over downtown. Over the outer districts, perhaps. Over the forests and lakes in the nearby area. Over the sports fields and Paul Bunyans, where food is good (but not too good, eh?). But not over the downtown area.

Not over the heart of Danville itself.

Civil war has been raging in the Tri-State Area for three years now. For many citizens, it has become entirely normal. Robots marching through the streets, airplanes flying over and dropping bombs on unsuspecting watermelons – it’s Albaquerque ’93 all over again. But this is different. It had been _Adjacent_ that had tried to split off, after all. And no matter all the dangerous inators that the Adjacing army had launched against the rest of the citizens of the Tri-State Area, the fight had still happened primarily on _their_ soil.

But now, airplanes have descended on City Hall itself, and the fight is no longer as remote as it once was. Now, it has become personal.

For one man has been the one to steady the ship of state through the muddy waters of warfare. One man has captained Danville through the storm that would have sunk everyone else. One man has… run out of naval metaphors, but you get the gist. He is the man who everyone respects, who is honest and decent and kind and strong and nice and competent and good and brave and basically just really awesome.

His opponents fear him. His fans adore him. His detractors admire him. Because even when they disagree with what he does, no one will doubt his skill and determination to see it through, the qualities that make him irreplaceable.

That man is Aloyse Everhart Elizabeth Otto Wolfgang Hypatia Gunther Galen Gary Cooper von Roddenstein (Rodney to his friends).

That man is the one who is in danger right now.

For the armada of the Confederacy of Totally Separate, Sovereign, Non-Lame Former Parts Of The Tri-State Area (COTSSNLFPOTS) is not just coming to City Hall for a show of glory. (Well, that too. Every pilot wants a selfie with them flying triumphantly over the heart of their enemy. (Which is a metaphor, of course – you can’t make selfies with real hearts, no one likes looking at pictures with gross, smushy red stuff. That includes ventricles. I’m talking to _you_ , Irving.)) They are here to capture Rodney – the one person who is key to keeping not just Danville’s war effort going, but the entire Tri-State Area.

And, as the directional angle of the airplanes over the town hall indicated, Mandy has just succeeded.

Now, “Mandy” doesn’t sound intimidating. She wasn’t, once – there was a time when she was just a bratty, obnoxious girl. But now, she’s a bratty, obnoxious _woman_ in a cyborg _robot suit_ , and that makes all the difference. No one will care about who you are inside when your body shoots lasers.

No, to the people of Danville “Mandy” is a name to fear. They all know the horrifying things she’s done – and if they don’t, they’ll make them up, just so that they have good horror stories to share at birthday parties to make themselves look cool. By this rate, pretty much everyone in town claims to have survived one encounter with Mandy – and curiously, no one has the appetite to have a second.

And now she has gotten her claws on Rodney.

It is a prospect that fills the people of Danville down below with fear. But really, they have no reason to be scared. Because there are more in the sky than just Mandy and Rodney. There are more than the mindless Normbots of the Confederacy. There are more than the brave animals of OWCA, trained to fight for the Tri-State Area.

There are Jedi Knights.

Two of them, in fact. _Only_ two.

But two is enough.

Because this is the age of heroes, and it…

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, less talky, more flying.” Candace Flynn’s airplane swivels around the Danvillian zeppelin. Inside the cockpit, the pilot’s eyes are barely distracted by the endless swarms of flying creatures that cloud the skies, from Normbot to airplanes to jetliners to zeppelins to paper planes to the occasional lost bird. Her focus lies on finding one particular aircraft, and she pulls it off. “Lock onto them, Perry,” she tells her platypus. “Master. Mandy’s ship is directly ahead of us. The one crawling with Vultures.”

“Oh, I see,” Stacy’s voice crackles through the intercom. “Oh, this is going to be easy!” 

Candace scowls, clearly not appreciating her master’s sarcasm. Behind them, several more planes line up, manned by a crew of OWCA troopers. Stacy gives them their instructions, while her former padawan gazes ahead impatiently, as always struggling to deal with the time it takes for their soldiers to be given their instructions and the fact that she has to wait for them. If it had been up to her, she would have flown straight into the fray, trusting on the Force and sheer single-mindedness to get her through to the other side.

But still, she waits. There have been times when she didn’t do that.

“I didn’t say this was going to be _easy_ , Stace,” she finally insists as Stacy has finished. “I know it’s not.” She pulls up her aircraft as she senses a Normbot firing towards her, easily evading the shot and then returning it, aiming for the engine and easily putting the robot out of commission. “But I know we can pull this off.”

“I know, Candace,” Stacy replies, her voice softening for a moment. “But we’re going to need to work together to get there, and we all have our own jobs to do for that. This is a high-stakes mission.”

“That’s the last thing you need to remind _me_ of,” Candace retorts, her voice rising in pitch. “The mayor’s in danger, and I’m not going to sit around doing nothing while Mandy might be out there trying to kill him! He’s just an ordinary guy, Stacy – he can’t do anything against that monster, and if she kills him…” Candace’s hands shake a little, and she shakes her head. “Well, you know what’ll happen to the Tri-State Area then!”

“I know,” Stacy replies reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Candace, we – eek!” She rapidly maneuvers her ship sideways as several Vultures come buzzing towards her, one landing just in front of the propeller. They are the smaller types of Normbots, but no less feared for their ability to fly, infiltrate in smaller spaces, and actually shut up for once. “Blast! This is why I hate flying!”

She attempts to swerve, to use her Force powers to remove the bots, but that has always been less effective than it should have been. As she does so, Candace’s plane moves in beside her, her left wing swooping over the right wing of Stacy’s ship in a daring maneuver that in 99.937 percent of cases would lead to both pilots crashing.

But these pilots have the Force, and although there is a brief moment where Stacy wonders whether her best friend is going to get her killed, she can breathe a sigh of relief as the other plane pulls away and only a single bot is left, which she quickly disposes off. Candace is not going to be the death of her today! That won’t be for another, like, twenty years or so.

“All right!” Candace cheers, leaning back to raise her hand up towards her platypus sidekick. “High five!”

“Nice job, Candace,” Stacy compliments. “But, um, have you looked ahead?”

Candace looks up, and can only fling her plane to the side just in time to avoid a hail of bullets from two enemy planes streaking overhead. She yelps, a chastised expression on her face. There is no more time for arguments, no time for banter. Not now that the Separatist armada has recognized the threat that they pose. Candace can count six, seven, no eight ships headed straight towards her.

Ordinary people might have faltered under those circumstances. Certainly ordinary people who had been freaking out just a couple of minutes ago. But not Candace Flynn.

Instead, Candace steers her plane directly towards her attackers. Her body tightens in the cockpit of her plane. Her acrophobia and anxiety fall away. Fear is replaced by determination. Anxiety by passion.

A friend being in danger is reason for panic. So is a spider in the bathroom, or a bad hair day. But being attacked by a seemingly endless stream of Normbots coming right at her?

A gleeful, vindictive grin fills her face, as if she were taking on video game monsters with a hair dryer while dressed in only a towel.

“This is where the _fun_ begins.”

This is Candace Flynn:

The Hero With No Fear. The Chosen One. Names that are given to her, names that are lifted one-on-one from her quasi-counterpart in a galaxy far far away. The people of Danville speak them with reverence, as if they encapsulate something that makes Candace Flynn rise above all other Jedi, above all other citizens of the Tri-State Area. She is the greatest warrior they have, the strongest Force sensitive of this generation.

The hero who can never, ever fail.

They are wrong.

In truth, Candace is ruled by fears and anxieties. This has been true since the first movie, when she was taken away from her mother and her little brother, even if the details of that remain a little unclear since said movie hasn’t actually been written. An uncertain, temperamental child, she was thrust into the Jedi Order at the behest of a woman whose primary concern was that the Force strength of her new prodigy could bring about world peace without caring much about what said prodigy thought of it, and later a young Jedi Knight who sought consolation over the loss of her master in hoarding loads and loads of shoes.

Now, all that is in the past (well, not the shoes, they still clogging up their joint apartment at the Jedi Temple). Candace and Stacy are a team. The team. They are the pride of the Jedi Order. Candace is the muscle, the impulsive one, the stubborn one. Stacy is the laid-back one, the voice of common sense, except when she isn’t, of course. (It’s _Egypt_ , Stace. The pyramids are in _Egypt_. How many times do we have to repeat this?) The twists and turns of their contrary mindsets are ones they have long gotten the chance to acquaint themselves with. Through Stacy, Candace has calmed down, has learned to think before she acts, has acquired some solidity in the chaos that is her mind. Through Candace, Stacy has had her mind opened to adventures she never thought possible.

Through the Force, they now know each other better than they know themselves.

It is only the fact that so many anxieties are left under the surface that Candace struggles to keep hidden.

Candace worries about many things. About not fitting in with the Jedi Order. About not living up to her image as the chosen one that can do no wrong – she believes many in the Order think she should be the perfect Jedi due to her high Force strength and mission, and give her nasty looks behind her back when she isn’t. But most of all, she fears losing the things she has.

For Candace, every day of her life is a fight to gain control and a desperate struggle to hold onto it, because if there is one thing she’s learned in her time in the Jedi Order, it’s that things won’t go right just by themselves. She has to work for them.

Back when Candace was young, she was a huge fan of this holo-show called Ducky Momo. (That was all a long time ago, though. She’s twenty-four now. She definitely doesn’t secretly watch it on TV screens in remote parts of the Tri-State Area when she’s supposed to be on a mission. That would be ridiculous.) And Ducky Momo had once devoted an episode to astronomy, showing the wonders of the universe both in its darker and lighter aspects.

_‘All things die, Ducky Momo,’_ the narrator had said. _‘Even the stars burn out. And when they do, they can produce black holes. Can you find the black hole?’_

_‘It’s behind you, Ducky Momo!’_ Candace had yelled. _‘It’s right behind you! Just turn around!’_

But it hadn’t mattered what she had yelled. For Ducky Momo had been sucked in anyway.

To this day, that memory has not let go of Candace Flynn – that thought that everything can _fail_ , that everything can _die_. It has driven her to hold on to the things she has so much more fiercely, even as part of her, hidden deep down, fears that no matter what she does, she will never be good enough. That in the end, she will fail all those she has sworn to protect, like she has already failed her mother.

But she tries. She still tries every day, and it’s that what makes Candace Flynn Candace Flynn – how she perseveres, when others would get down. How she sticks with grim determination to her mission, completely unwavering.

And in some moments, she feels like she’s pulling it off. Like she has everything in her life under control. That no one, not Stacy, not Phineas, not the OWCA troopers under her command, will ever get hurt, because she is watching over them. It is in those moments that she shines – that she truly is the Hero With No Fear.

That is what Candace dreams of.

But in the cold light of day, those dreams all too often disappear into mist.

The two airplanes land on the deck of Mandy’s airship. (It’s a really big airship, okay? Don’t question the narrative.) In a long-practiced way, Stacy leaps out of her plane and starts taking out Normbots with her lightsaber. It’s enough to deflect their attacks from Candace, as the younger girl is able to climb out of her plane more patiently and join in. Together, the two Jedi and their platypus make their way over to the nearest computer terminal.

“All right, Perry,” Stacy says. “Where is the mayor?” They should have brought Pinky. Pinky’s good with computers. But for now, Perry will do.

Using holograms, scissors and other vaguely technological wizardry the author can’t be bothered to describe because he’s lazy, Perry brings up the information they need. “Hmm…” Stacy mutters. “Apparently, the mayor has been bound up just behind the cockpit of the airship. That’s in the room right next to us, behind that door that has been left ajar to indicate that it is unlocked. That would fit with the giant flashing “To Mayor Rodney” signs around it.” She frowns. “Strange. I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but I think this _could_ be some kind of trap.”

“Could be, could be,” Candace allows. “So what do we do?”

Stacy grins. “We spring the trap.”

Candace grins back, and turns to her platypus. “All right Perry, you stay here, and report it if there’s any trouble.” He chatters. “Great! Come on, Stacy, we’re wasting daylight here.” She charges forwards in the direction of the opened door.

“Candace, wait,” Stacy says. “You… seem tense. I know this means a lot to you, but you can’t let your anxieties cloud your senses. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Force signature coming from the front of the ship.”

Candace stiffens up. “She’s the _enemy_ ,” she replies. “Darth Amor is public enemy number one to the Jedi Order, no matter what the public may say about her being a ‘Hero Antagonist’ or something like that! Capturing her could be a huge chance to turn the tide of the war in our favor – if we can get a chance to get to her, she’s going down, down, down!”

“I know, Candace.” Stacy gives her former padawan an almost motherly look, even though Candace once had a mother and the two are only a few years apart in age anyway. “I know you… have grievances against her, for threatening your brother. For cutting off your arm. I just don’t want you to storm off into something and get yourself in trouble.”

Candace nods, sighing. “I know, I know,” she murmurs. “But that isn’t going to happen this time, I swear. You trust me, right?”

Stacy smiles sheepishly. “Well…”

“Come on!” Candace gives her sister-in-arms a disarming grin, even though the tenseness doesn’t entirely fade from her face. “When have I ever let you down?”

Stacy grins, and pats her friend on the back as the two of them enter the main room of the airship through the large doors. They see Rodney sitting in a chair at the other end, looking oddly regal for a prisoner (which isn’t anything to worry about, though, I’m sure) and for a moment Stacy allows herself to hope that maybe this can be a quick in-out mission, and Rodney will be safe before anyone on the Confederate side can say “Unsuccessful retrieval mission of enemy head of state”.

“Mr. Mayor,” she says formally, looking at the disheveled man sitting in front of her. Rodney looks more tensed up than normal, and through the Force she can sense how it’s affecting Candace.

“Are you all right?” Candace asks. “They didn’t hurt you, did they?” For a moment there, Stacy wonders what will happen if Rodney says yes. She trusts her padawan to be able to deal with those volatile emotions of hers, but she knows as much as anyone how much Candace can get caught up in something. She just wants to get out of here as soon as possible, without any further distractions.

But all those thoughts die out in Stacy’s mind before she can voice them. For Rodney isn’t looking at her, or at Candace – he’s looking past them. And as she looks around, Stacy can see their enemy standing on the bridge behind them.

“Hey girls,” she says, in that familiar, refined voice of hers that sounds playful and casual, but which rather reminds Stacy of a cat announcing its presence to a mouse (well, if cats could do such a thing, of course) rather than anything more innocent. She looks them both over, and tension seizes the both of them as they imperceptibly tighten their grips on their lightsabers and turn to face the woman they have pursued throughout the Tri-State Area for so long.

“Whatcha doing?”


End file.
